Create a Link Using the href Attribute

Learning Goals

  • Write an a tag to create a link

Introduction

We've got our HTML tags, and we've got our HTML tag attributes. How do we use them together? We can figure it out by exploring the a tag and creating a link.

Getting Started

Fork and clone this lesson into your local environment. Navigate into its directory in the terminal, then run code . to open the files in Visual Studio Code. Finally, run bundle to install the lab's dependencies.

Write an a Tag to Create a Link

Open index.html in your text editor. Add an a tag with the inner text (the text between the <a> tag and the </a> tag) of Flatiron School anywhere in the file. Then set the href attribute of your new link element to https://flatironschool.com.

You can run the tests with this lab via the rspec command. Make sure you save the file before running the test suite. Failing tests will provide helpful error messages that you can use to debug your code — read them closely for hints!

Viewing Your Work in the Browser

While working through these assignments, your general workflow should center on writing code in the text editor and checking to see what it looks like in-browser.

Working in your local environment, you can open index.html a few ways, depending on the environment you are in:

For Mac users:

  • Open from the Terminal by running open index.html in the root directory of this lab
  • Use Finder to navigate to this lab's local folder and click the index.html file

For WSL users:

  • Open from Ubuntu by running explorer.exe index.html in the root directory of this lab
  • Open a new Explorer window. There is a bar that says "Quick Access" along the top of the window (similar to a URL bar in a browser). Click this and type \\wsl$ to access files and folders on Ubuntu. Navigate to /home/<your-user-name>/ to get to your home directory, then locate this lab's local folder and click the index.html file.

Once you have the HTML document open in your browser, you can make changes to it in a text editor, save the file, refresh the page in the browser, and see the changes.

Saving Your Work Remotely

Currently, the work you've done on this assignmnent is only on your local machine. To preserve work on your GitHub fork, you will need to stage the changes you've made, commit them, and push the commit up to GitHub. Use the following commands to do this:

git add .
git commit -m "Completed assignment"
git push

If you visit your fork on GitHub, you should now see that you've made the most recent commit, and your solution will be present in the files.

Conclusion

Here we saw how an attribute helps the a tag do its job, which is to link to another location. Now we can go on to explore some additional HTML tags.

Resources